Margaret Atwood is seated in a half-finished bird observatory on Pelee Island, the southernmost sliver of Canada, warning a journalist about chiggers. The building she helped create has no lightbulbs yet in several of its lamps. This is not a metaphor she would reach for — she's too precise for that — but it lands anyway: the infrastructure for paying attention to the natural world is still being built, still incomplete, still urgently needed. On Friday, Western University in London, Ontario announced that Atwood had donated C$1m (£540,000) to establish the Graeme Gibson Chair in Avian Biology. Gibson, her partner and a novelist in his own right, died in 2019 after vascular dementia took his language but not, apparently, his attention. He watched birds from a backyard feeder until near the end. 'I no longer know their names,' he told a friend. 'But then, they don't know my name either.' Atwood quoted this line in a foreword to his book, The Bedside Book of Birds. She is quoting it again now, to explain why a million dollars felt like the right way to mark what he left behind. The gift funds research into questions that sound simple until you actually sit with them: How do birds navigate thousands of kilometres? How do they detect magnetic fields? How does a blackpoll warbler fly 1,800 miles nonstop over open ocean from the boreal forest to South America — and why has its population dropped more than 80% in five decades? Chris Guglielmo, co-director of Western's Advanced Facility for Avian Research, says his whiteboard is covered in unanswered questions. He was told to sit down before he received the call about the donation. His team has already built the world's first hypobaric climatic wind tunnel for bird flight. What they've lacked is funding at the scale the questions deserve. Atwood and Gibson co-founded the Pelee Island Bird Observatory more than two decades ago. Pelee sits at the intersection of the Atlantic and Mississippi migration routes; more than 200 species arrive each spring, alongside thousands of serious birders. The new Atwood-Gibson Bird Centre, which recently opened on the island, expands the observatory's footprint. Atwood is simultaneously treated there as literary royalty — queues form for photographs — and as Peggy, the islander who spends months at her cottage and knows which grass hides the chiggers. Her reasoning about the donation is characteristically unromantic on the surface: 'I have what they call a platform. And I also had what they call extra money.' Underneath that deadpan is a consistent intellectual position. Science answers questions that matter. Birds are losing ground — Canada and the US have lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970, and migratory species are down nearly 30% — and the losses are accelerating with climate change. Atwood names the four biggest threats as windows, cats, toxic pollution, and habitat destruction, and notes that the first two are the easier ones to fix. 'People think: we can cut down this forest and make another one over there. It's not going to be the same. Birds have specific habitats. It's not like spreading butter on a piece of toast.' The birding angle is not incidental to her literary identity. She and Gibson once attended a party dressed as Odin's ravens, Thought and Memory — he made beaks from black construction paper. Her graphic novel Angel Catbird blurs the human-bird boundary deliberately. More than eleven years ago she signed a letter of outrage when the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped nature words, including 'raven,' in favour of technology vocabulary. What runs through all of it is the conviction that attention to the non-human world is not a hobby but a form of knowledge — and that losing the words for things is the first step toward losing the things themselves. She is optimistic, in her specific way, about the future. Young people are buying 'great big fat Victorian novels,' booksellers tell her. Birding is surging among younger generations. Hope, she argues, is not a policy position but a biological baseline: 'Unless you're deeply depressed, you wake up every morning thinking, what will this day bring? Maybe it will be a chocolate bar.' What she is funding, underneath all the ornithology, is the infrastructure for continued noticing — the instruments and the people trained to use them, pointed at a world that is changing faster than our ability to describe it.
